mjw1007

31 ms·

331.
by mjw1007 5y ago
The history summarised here is the main reason. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27761407 (You might hope that that quote exaggerates what was done to Haiti, but if anything it underplays it.)
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by mjw1007 5y ago
If you're starting from an essay, I doubt all those things together would he as helpful as adding a spoken-word audio track. Or some text.
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by mjw1007 5y ago
Compare the design of Featherstitch [1], in contrast to BSD's soft updates. (I wonder what happened to Featherstitch.) [1]: https://lwn.net/Articles/354861/ It's a common pattern that you have a list of
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by mjw1007 5y ago
I'm saying that I don't think reasoning by considering questions like « How likely is it that the prolific systemd team and tech decision makers in Linux distributions don’t have a design instinct and came up with this ball of mud
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by mjw1007 5y ago
It certainly does sometimes happen that difficult software projects end up being implemented by people who (at least at the start) don't understand the problems involved, for reasons related to the "winner's curse" [1].
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by mjw1007 5y ago
Another complication is that in glibc's implementation TLS variables come out of the same space as the per-thread stack. As far as I can tell this is something they think in principle should be changed. https://sourceware.or
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by mjw1007 5y ago
Not easy at all. I know that in the small-embedded world, people do work on such things. Eg https://github.com/japaric/cargo-call-stack
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by mjw1007 5y ago
I remember reading about arguments over whether Algol should permit recursive procedures, where one side of the argument was apparently claiming that they wouldn't be possible to implement. That seems pretty strange to modern ears, but
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by mjw1007 5y ago
The inconvenience goes further than building in the first place. If I want to try running a Debian package with an experimental patch as a one-off, I haven't found it too hard to build my own version. But AFAIK there's nothing tha
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by mjw1007 5y ago
As I understand it, galaxies don't rotate like rigid bodies: stars further from the centre take longer to go round than ones closer in, much like planets further from the sun take longer to complete an orbit. If stars that start off in
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by mjw1007 5y ago
« Originally, Python was dynamically scoped. This basically means that, to evaluate an expression, a compiler first searches the current block and then successively all the calling functions. » Python was never dynamically scoped. Before Py
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by mjw1007 5y ago
Some history of the question of whether Rust should have GC as standard: 2014-09. RFC 256 https://rust-lang.github.io/rfcs/0256-remove-refcounting-gc-... « Remove the reference-counting based Gc<T> type from the
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by mjw1007 5y ago
I think it's difficult to do review work as an 'outsider'. You might be able to report an outright bug if you find one, and you can report "this old patch still applies and passes its tests", but other than that it
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by mjw1007 5y ago
When Rust 1.0 was released, the stated stability commitment had three documented caveats: « We reserve the right to fix compiler bugs, patch safety holes, and change type inference in ways that may occasionally require new type annotations.
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by mjw1007 5y ago
Software that embeds Python uses the library (even on Debian and Ubuntu: they end up building the whole Python source base twice). For example Vim (if so configured), or Postgres PL/Python, or the old Apache mod_python.
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by mjw1007 5y ago
Here's a relatively mild rant where the breaking change in question was in /proc/cpuinfo: «Really. Shut up. The whole "no regressions" thing is very much about the fact that we don't waste users time.» https:&
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by mjw1007 5y ago
Right, but the We Do Not Break User Space rule has often been explained (somewhat emphatically on occasion) as depending on whether anyone's code actually gets broken, not on whether the thing they were relying on was intended to be,
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by mjw1007 5y ago
I disagree. I think they intended your reading, but if I attempt to read it as strictly as possible I'd say they have defined a representation of a particular set of points in time, not intervals, and the "inclusive" in the d
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by mjw1007 5y ago
I think Bugzilla is more likely to become unhappy with large numbers of visitors than Discourse would be. This way all the readers who think "one extra second, I don't care" and close the tab won't contribute to the prob
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by mjw1007 5y ago
I can't speak for kstenerud, but looking at the compact-time github page they appear to have written a solution that meets their own needs, and kindly made it available to the world for free. They don't appear to be attempting to
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by mjw1007 5y ago
Thinking about the dangers of subtle incompatibilities, I think the existence of crater[1] could make a huge difference, once alternative implementations are far enough along. Arguably the nearest thing to a specification for the Rust langu
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by mjw1007 5y ago
As I understand it, many countries set the rate of tax on dividends, and on gains from selling shares, to be below the rate of income tax by roughly the rate of corporation tax. In particular, things tend to be set up so that for small comp
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by mjw1007 5y ago
There is, to my mind, a significant difference between a blog post from the lang team and a blog post from Ferrous systems which thanks the lang team for their feedback.
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by mjw1007 5y ago
I've been expecting some kind of announcement from the lang team saying something about how the third party Ferrocene / sealed Rust project fits in with the official project and its documentation. Do you know if there's been
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by mjw1007 5y ago
Seven years is quite a long time in this area. It's possible that running exactly the CentOS-in-2014 model would work now even if it didn't then. It's also possible that in 2014 CentOS would have found other ways to remain vi
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by mjw1007 5y ago
I think you can measure what a project cares about by the priorities they give to different pieces of work. Empirically, since 1.0 the project as a whole has prioritised adding new features over documenting (and agreeing the intended behavi
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by mjw1007 5y ago
I think the use case for modifications is letting people write custom extensions to a font editor.
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by mjw1007 5y ago
This appears to be https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1962841 , filed by the blog post author four days ago.
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by mjw1007 5y ago
I agree. I don't have much sympathy for people who were doing things like writing multithreaded programs in the days before C documented its memory model and then becoming unhappy because new optimisations that legitimately help single
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by mjw1007 5y ago
I have no special knowledge, but I think it goes roughly like this: - a few years ago, the previous head-of-staff ('christel') became an employee of Andrew Lee's company - sometime last year they left the company and also sto

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